Via Dolorosa: A Guide for Christians to Pray the Stations of the Cross

Based on early Christian practice, pilgrims to Jerusalem reconstructed the events of Good Friday along the "Way of Suffering," the Via Dolorosa. The Spanish nun, Egeria, writes of her own experience with this in her fourth century Holy Week journal. In the Middle Ages, the Franciscans and Dominicans particularly picked up on the ritual, and transported it from Jerusalem to chapels and churches outside the Holy Land. If one could not make the pilgrimage to the place of Jesus's passion, then ...